


Heirloom

by Lapsed_Scholar



Series: Family Stories [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: AU, Adoption, F/M, Family, Fluff, Growing Up, I think this counts as fluff, It's a bit sentimental, Judaism, Traditions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 23:42:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12758673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: Tangled families, forgotten traditions, living history





	Heirloom

**Author's Note:**

> It was [redacted] years ago since I was thirteen, but I think I remember something of how it felt.

When Emily Scully was almost thirteen, her friend Rachel had a _bat mitzvah_ , which, as Rachel put it, made her an adult. Emily didn’t quite think it did that, and she protested to Rachel that she still had to go to school and live with her parents and couldn’t even drive yet.

“Well, I mean, I’m an adult according to _Jewish_ law, and I’m responsible enough to be considered a full member of my temple. I don’t have to go to Hebrew school anymore—I get to participate with the adults.”

Emily asked her mother about it. Her mother smiled and looked up from the book she was reading. “You remember your First Communion, right? It’s similar to that.”

The connection intrigued her, so she researched different coming-of-age ceremonies. It seemed relevant to her current stage of life. She asked Grandma Maggie about _her_ First Communion, and also about her mother’s.

She found Mulder in the office, typing on the computer, and flopped in the chair next to him. He smiled at her in greeting and kept typing.

“What’s up, Em?”

“Did you have a _bar mitzvah_?”

He startled and stopped typing, pulled off his glasses, and turned to look at her. “I, um, no. Why, uh, why do you ask?”

She was more confused by his reaction than the answer. “But...you’re an adult.”

He smiled a little at that. “Yes. Well, I like to think so, anyway.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “And you’re Jewish,” she pointed out.

“Ah.” He sighed and tilted back in his chair. He looked as though he were thinking. “I’m Jewish, but I’m not religious. And although some Jewish people do practice—cultural heritage and other things like that—without being religious, I’m not really one of them. It’s...uh...not really a heritage I had a lot of exposure to, or education in, growing up.”

She frowned at him. He elaborated. “I’m Jewish because my mother was.”

She raised her eyebrows and wrinkled her forehead. “Does that mean _I’m_ Jewish, too?” She didn’t realize that it could work like that.

He gave her a little smile. “ _Your_ mother’s Catholic, Em.”

She felt oddly cold, like she had swallowed ice, and she dropped his gaze and started to back away in her chair. For as long as she could remember, Mulder had treated her like his daughter, even before there had been any sort of official connection between him and her mother. She could never remember him making a distinction between her and William, and even though she knew intellectually that there _was_ a difference (Will called him “Daddy,” for one thing), it stung, badly, to hear him voice it like this.

He must’ve guessed her thoughts from her reaction because he touched her hand gently, ducked his head to seek out her eyes. “Emily, Jewish identity runs through the _mother’s_ side, strictly speaking. My mother was Jewish, and therefore, so am I, even though my father was not. To apply the rules of _my_ heritage—though, I should note, your mother’s doesn’t work this way—to you and your brother, you’re both Catholics. But that doesn’t mean I love either of you any less.”

She nodded and felt like she could breathe again, though she was a little embarrassed by the intensity of her reaction. Especially because she _knew_ very well that they weren’t biologically related, knew that she couldn’t actually inherit anything from him. She looked back up at him and took a steadying breath. “So why _didn’t_ your family observe any sort of religious or cultural traditions?”

Mulder tilted his head back toward the ceiling with a sigh. He seemed to be thinking again. “Let’s go for a walk, Em.”

It was late autumn, which meant coats. Her mom made her wear a hat. Mulder avoided wearing a hat by saying something about Massachusetts versus Virginia, and her mom gave him a reproachful look and pointed out that he’d lived in Virginia far longer than Massachusetts, but accepted the kiss he dropped on her temple.

Will had initially declared an intention to go with them, but Mulder must have somehow indicated something of the purpose of this walk to her mother (even though Emily hadn’t heard them talking). Her mother declared that she needed Will’s help with dinner, and she wanted to spend some time cooking with just the two of them. Will had always had a fascination with the kitchen and with cooking, so he was easily swayed.

Emily felt oddly grown up as she and Mulder crunched through the leaves and browned grass. It was brisk, but not quite cold. She contemplated taking off her hat, but Mulder shook his head.

“ _You’re_ not wearing a hat,” she protested.

“I’m too tall for your mom to put a hat on me. And I’m an adult, as you so adroitly observed earlier.”

After they had crunched their way through the grass to the woods bordering their yard, Mulder started to speak again. “My family—both sides, really—were kind of New England aristocracy. I grew up around a lot of very well-connected people and a lot of money. A lot of opportunities. And a lot of rather stifling social expectations, too, if you want to know the truth.”

Emily stared at him. Her parents had always dismissed her worries about money vaguely, but she thought that was because her mother had a good job.

He met her eyes and gave her a little smile of acknowledgement. “I don’t talk about it a lot because it’s not really something I want to define me. And honestly, it’s a little painful for me to think about. But rest assured that an estate that size can afford very good lawyers, property managers, and financial planners to administer it, and if anything ever happens to me and your mother, you and Will will be very well taken care of.”

She frowned at him. She didn’t like to think about that. _Financially_ taken care of wasn’t the same thing as having parents. (She had lost her first parents—she knew this very well.) “But _who_ would take care of us?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “Your uncle John, believe it or not.”

She blinked. Of all of her parents’ friends, Aunt Monica was the most frequent babysitter. (Followed by Uncles Frohike, Byers, and Langly, but she got the feeling that her mother probably wouldn’t regard them as responsible guardians on a permanent basis.) She had actually expected the answer to be Grandma Maggie or Uncle Bill and Aunt Tara.

Mulder elaborated, “He’s been a father. And he knows how to protect the both of you, and I have no doubts at all that he’d do everything possible to ensure your safety.” There was something dark in his voice that made her shiver—made her realize that he and her mother had contemplated this possibility thoroughly, and they even deemed it plausible. They likely hadn’t been thinking hypothetically about random accidents or illnesses, either.

He lightened his tone a little, teasing. “And when you’re older, if you have your own children, and you need to start to contemplate alternative guardians for them, believe me, you’ll very judgmentally evaluate all of your friends for general responsibility and overall sobriety.”

All of those possibilities seemed very far away to Emily.

Mulder changed topic again. “But, anyway. The sort of rarefied atmosphere that I grew up around...it comes with strictures about who you’re allowed to associate with. There’s family history and family honor, and you’re beholden to it. My mother’s family... They were rich, well-educated, and cultured, but that wasn’t enough for most of my father’s family. Wealth is one thing, bloodline is another. And when my father married into a Jewish family, that was too much for a lot of them to accept.

“It was ugly, apparently. We never really talked about it—I only put it together when I was older, why we didn’t really speak to my father’s family much. I still don’t; I do talk to one of my cousins, but she had to grow up before she realized just _why_ her family never liked my mother. And then she reached out to me when my father died.

“It’s not like my parents were social pariahs. And they certainly still had very high, family-honor-based expectations of me. In both my career and my...associations. But, in an atmosphere like the one they inhabited and strove to maintain a respectable standing in, overt Jewishness is something of a liability. Polite society will overlook it, but it’s not something they’ll actively embrace. I don’t know if my mother was ever religious, or if it had meant much to her when she was younger. We just didn’t...talk about it much. Even with her parents—the grandparents that I knew. I guess she had come to an agreement with them to just...not bring it up.”

Emily was quiet, watching Mulder. She had never heard him talk about his family in this much detail before. He very rarely referenced them. She had asked her mother about that when she was younger. Her mother had simply said that his sister had died a long time ago, that his parents were also dead, and that talking about it made him sad.

“ _I_ never met your mother,” she said, quietly. She wondered if she would have been considered an appropriate association for Mulder by his family. She doubted it.

“No. She died when you were still quite young. And we had a...difficult relationship. I did love her, a great deal, and I think she loved me as well as she could, but... My family never really recovered from the loss of my sister. It tore my parents apart, and it tore them both inside, and I don’t think they ever really knew what to do with the child they had left.” He gave her a slightly rueful smile. “Scully—your mother—has never forgiven either of my parents for that, by the way. But she’s usually too polite to bring it up, even to me.

“You never met my mother because I simply didn’t share much of my life with her by the time you were a part of it. I would talk to her on the phone sometimes, visit on occasion, but it was hard for us to really reach each other by then. We were too caught by the past for me to ever want to try to talk to her about my present or future.” He gave her a half-embarrassed smile, “And, to be honest, I think I was still afraid of insinuating myself too heavily into _your_ mother’s life. I didn’t want to pressure her into giving me more than she wanted to.”

Emily stared at him in disbelief. “You were both so _strange_ about that.”

“So you’ve said. And so you said at the time. Repeatedly, if I recall. And occasionally to both of us at once. You are by far the boldest matchmaker I ever met.”

“Do you regret it?” She wasn’t actually sure which part of it she was talking about.

He looked down at her with an evaluating expression, as though he was trying to figure out what she really wanted to ask him. Mulder was actually remarkably good at reading people. Sometimes it seemed eerie. “I do have regrets in my life, Em. But I’ve never been anything but proud of you, and I will never, ever regret anything that brought me the family that I have now.” He gave her a smile. “Now, what do you say we head back to the house? My ears are cold.”

She smiled back up at him and walked a little closer on their way back.

Will met them jubilantly just inside the door. “Daddy! Emmy! We made soup!” he announced, giggling. He looked like he was _wearing_ soup, and Mulder, crouching down, seemed to have come to the same conclusion. “I can see that,” he observed. “What, uh, what happened, exactly?”

“It exploded! It was awesome!”

Emily stared over their heads into the sliver of kitchen visible from the front door. There were arcs of red liquid dripping from the upper cabinets. And possibly the ceiling. “Mulder—”

He looked up to follow her gaze. “That’s tomato soup, Em. It’s not blood.” Emily pondered, not for the first time, just what sort of experience her parents had, that they could both make judgments like that so very quickly and automatically. She tried not to think about it too much.

Mulder had turned back to Will, who still looked giddy. “William, go upstairs and take a bath. Put those clothes in the sink. And try not to _touch_ anything before you do.”

Will trailed up the stairs, still giggling. Mulder straightened up and sighed. “You asked me about regrets, earlier? I regret not putting that blender that your mother got as a thoughtfully _pointed_ gift from her brother on the highest shelf in the kitchen where I’m the only one who could reach it.”

But as he went into the kitchen, he was fighting a grin, and he broke his own rule about touching by pulling her mother—who was more thoroughly covered in soup than William—against him in a hug and holding her there. Despite her protestations that she was filthy and would just make him filthy, too, she sighed heavily and leaned into him. She seemed grateful for the support.

“Scully...what _happened_?” he asked the top of her head.

“Didn’t you hear your son, Mulder? It _exploded_.”

“But—Scully, did you really try to blend warm soup without holding the lid down? You’re a _physicist_.” He had lost the battle: He was laughing now.

“Shut up, Mulder.” She sounded indignant, muffled against his chest. “I’m just glad it wasn’t hot enough to burn either one of us,” she mumbled.

That sobered him a bit, but he was still smiling. “Hmm, you and me both.” He pulled back from her a little to inspect her. “I sent Will to take a bath. Why don’t you go do the same thing. I’ll...see what I can do for the kitchen.”

“OK,” she mumbled, nodding and relaxing a little. “OK.”

He tilted her chin up and kissed her mouth gently before she left the kitchen. She gave Emily a wan smile and walked down the hallway with a very tired-sounding sigh.

Emily slipped from the living room into the kitchen. She took in the full extent of the mess with wide eyes. There was soup on the countertop, the upper cabinets, the ceiling, the sink, the stove, and, quite possibly, the toaster. “Mulder?”

He turned around to look her. The front of his shirt was stained red where he had hugged her mother. His expression was a little overwhelmed, but still generally amused. He pulled open the drawer that held old rags. “Grab a towel, Em.”

~

The day that Emily turned thirteen, her friends and family gathered to celebrate. She got gifts—books and clothes and a few video games. She sat on the floor of the family room and laughed and played games with her friends. It was, in short, a delightfully ordinary thirteenth birthday.

In the evening, after Will had gone to bed and all the guests had gone home, she sat on end of the sofa, curled over the arm, reading beside her mother. Mulder had gotten up, mumbling something about being right back.

When he came back, he sat in the chair adjacent to the sofa, next to her. “I, uh, do have something else for you, Emily.”

She marked her place carefully and looked up to receive a small, oblong box. The outside was velvet, and it looked old. She took it carefully and gingerly opened the lid.

Inside was a bracelet, simple, but strung from cream-colored pearls. She touched it, ran her finger over their cool smoothness, and looked up at Mulder, wide-eyed and unsure what to say.

He was watching her with a smile and an odd look in his eyes that she couldn’t quite place. He almost looked sad. “That bracelet belonged to my mother. And to her mother and to her mother’s mother. I, um, overheard her talking to my sister about it once. She said it had been passed down through the women in our family. And that it would be passed to my sister, in turn.” He swallowed and cleared his throat. “Once she turned thirteen.”

There were several pieces of history to absorb in that story—implications that he was leaving for her to connect. When she did connect them, they hit her hard, in a sudden, blinding rush of belonging, tangled history, lost and kept traditions, and love. She blinked back tears.

Mulder continued, quietly. “I inherited it when she died, along with everything else. But, um, it doesn’t really belong with me so much as with the women in my family. With my daughter on her thirteenth birthday.”

She sniffled, blinked a few tears away, and looked back into the box. She touched the pearls again, could almost feel the rush of history through them. They had been worn by so many different women, with so many different lives and experiences, dreams and hopes. They were all dead now. But this bracelet remained, a witness to them all, passed down to its new owner at the very dawn of her adulthood. She wondered what her own dreams and hopes would be. She wasn’t quite sure yet.

She gently shut the box, set it and the book carefully on the sofa beside her. (Next to her mother, who was watching in silence, but with a loving smile and slightly teary eyes.) Emily looked up at Mulder again. He was watching her with a mix of love and pride and a little nostalgia. Words didn’t seem adequate, so she stood up a little shakily. He thankfully seemed to read her correctly and stood up as well, allowing her to hug him (hard) around the waist.

She apparently hugged the air out of him because he let out a startled breath and mumbled, “Careful, Em, you’re stronger than you used to be,” before hugging her back.

She took the book and the box up with her to bed. (“I had better not catch you up with a flashlight, Emily Margaret,” her mother had admonished, after kissing her goodnight, so she really wasn’t quite an adult, not yet.) She dreamed of family, of generations of women lined up like pearls on a string. She took her place beside them.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't put warm things in a blender without holding down the lid.


End file.
